Best Business Ideas 2017

12 Awesome Business Ideas To Make You Rich In 2017

This has been an unpredictable 12 months for the economy – while the immediate shocks and downturns threatened by the Brexit vote and Trump’s election win either failed to materialise or were short-lived, 2017 looks set to be a challenging year. A recent assessment from Price Waterhouse Cooper sees UK growth and consumer spending slowing down, although an outright recession being avoided. However, there will still be opportunities and growth in certain sectors: so, with this in mind, where do the experts think there’s money to be made in 2017? Pay close attention.

Edible Insects

Edible insects like crickets and mealworms have never really caught on – although two billion people worldwide eat them as part of their regular diet, the Western public is still strangely resistant to the idea of eating whole locusts. However, with increasing evidence that critters make a superb, sustainable, low-carbon protein source, providers are getting more inventive, grinding them into a flour which can be added to other foodstuffs or converting them to a meat substitute. Mexican chain Wahaca has featured insects on its menus since 2013, with analysts predicting further growth in the sector in response to soaring meat prices.

Sea Vegetables

Some of the UK’s most acclaimed new restaurants of recent years have made a major feature of surprisingly simple vegetable dishes (i.e. the cauliflower “steak” at Soho’s Palomar). As price, ethics and health concerns exert more pressure on meat, expect more exploration of the world of greenery, including those underexplored reaches of the sea. Dulse (a kind of seaweed) works well as not just one of your five a day, but a healthy salt substitute. Growers also claim it works as a hangover cure, making it the perfect British foodstuff.

Zero Waste

French supermarket chain Intermarche blazed a trail in 2014 by selling ‘ugly’ (ie misshapen) fruit and vegetables at a 30% discount to their customers. This move was in response to UN Food and Agricultural Organisation figures showing that a criminal 40% of fruit and vegetables go to waste worldwide because they don’t look right. With sales of this sort of produce booming, the Too Good To Go app takes things one step further, allowing you to swoop in and buy the dishes restaurants would otherwise be chucking out at the end of the day, for as little as £2 (and a maximum of £3.80). Meanwhile, restaurants like Brighton’s Silo are built on an ethos of reusing, reducing and recycling.

Law

Brexit is now all-but guaranteed to happen in some form or another. However this pans out, it guarantees a huge demand for services of business lawyers and contract negotiators (amazingly, your mate who claims “it’s just like leaving a contract with the gym, simples” is talking out of his neck). “Law firms are braced for a Brexit bonanza,” according to LegalWeek. “Lawyers are already receiving floods of inquiries from clients trying to work out what the result means for their businesses.

Most major firms are running 24-hour hotlines to deal with the massive levels of client demand. Once this initial frenzy subsides, lawyers will then play a crucial role in helping clients navigate one of the largest programmes of regulatory and legislative reform ever seen. The event has once again shown the degree to which the legal sector is insulated against wider economic and market malaise.” As an extra sweetener for our learned friends, the falling value of the pound means that London’s legal fraternity suddenly look more affordable to foreign clients.

Voice Technology

Voice technology has now fully come of age: Apple’s Siri fields 2bn commands each week, while 20% of Google’s searches carried out via Android handsets in the US originate with voice commands. The Amazon Echo has made voice-driven tech an unthreatening feature of the domestic set-up. As the ‘deep learning’ which powers these systems exponentially improves, the tasks which the technology can be trusted with and applied to will expand. With Amazon offering a $1m prize pot for any bot which can talk “coherent and engagingly” with a human for 20 minutes, expect more interest and development in this sector.

Cactus water

Out-purify coconut water bores with the next frontier in clear, brackish drinks: cactus water. Adherents claim that the drink contains powerful antioxidants and naturally-occurring electrolytes: the launch of True Nopal by drinks giant Lucozade Ribena Suntory will give it a major push from the health food shop to the high street.

Services For Freelancers

While “the gig economy” is an infuriating misnomer (a lack of sick pay doesn’t make you anything like a rock star), an increasing number of us are now making our own way in the workplace – the freelance economy grew to 55 million Americans this year, or 35% of the country’s workers, with an increasing number of white-collar as well as blue-collar workers going self-employed. Analysts foresee the market being worth £43bn globally by 2020: while this creates an opportunity for more services connecting workers and employees, there is also a growing need for more agile HR techniques to engage with a disparate workforce, and also services which protect and help lone workers, from self-accountancy to entry-level legal protection and advice.

Data Security

Perhaps the most important news development in 2016 was the realisation that anything you put online is insecure and a lot of people are trying to get at it. The EU General Data Protection Regular act is due to come into force on May 25, 2018 and in advance of this a recent Computer Weekly/TechTarget IT survey found that while spending on on-site servers dropped in favour of cloud computing, mobile endpoint security was the top security spend for UK tech firms. Cloud security and identity management came a close second and third when firms were asked about what they were planning to invest in. As well as shoring up the tech side of their operations, firms also revealed plans to invest in face to face training of users to make them less susceptible to phishing attacks and scams.

Cannabis

2016 was a good year for the cannabis industry – more American states moved towards legalisation, while Colorado reached the $1bn mark for annual sales of the drug. The focus of the market is likely to shift from Denver to LA (where citywide consumption of medical marijuana already outpaces the whole state of Colorado) with further exploration taking place into market-widening synthetic cannabinoids, recycling options for crops which don’t reach medical standard, the growth of high-end ‘craft weed’ and the possibility of a major sports organisation approving the use of cannabis in injury treatment.

Crowdfunding

Platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have now surpassed traditional venture capital as a means of funding new businesses ($34bn as opposed $30bn by the latest figures). Interestingly, these platforms are now being used by established businesses to road-test and validate interest in their new products, rather than companies which are starting from scratch. “Now, each new product idea has a crowdfunding component to validate the market,” said Ryan Bradley, founder of watch brand Smith & Bradley. “Based on the velocity or success of the crowdfunding effort, we shift our resources to meet market demand.” Expect more firms to experiment with ideas in this way.

Anti-email

While email is not going to die any time soon, it’s increasingly seen as a major drain on productivity and creativity. The average worker sends and receives 122 messages a day, taking a major bite out of the working day. This has given rise to platforms like Slack – a less formal, office-based comms tool that claims to reduce internal email by 48.6% and more closely mirrors the scattergun chatrooms that millenials came of technological age talking in. Now just three years old, Slack has already been valued at $2.8bn, a figure that made it the fastest growing business-to-business company in history.

Cryptocurrencies

With insecurity and unpredictability continuing to roil the world’s markets, traditional havens – stocks, bonds and real estate – are arguably all either over-saturated or in risky bubbles. Some investors see cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin as an alternative haven. A recent report identified strong growth in the value of Bitcoin throughout 2016, with more predicted for 2017 as investors respond to national crises (Brexit, Trump, the movement of refugees etc) by looking for a currency which – while still volatile – isn’t tied to one country’s fortunes, or one politician’s angry midnight tweets.